


A Woman of Independent Means

by PacificRimbaud



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Victorian, Awkward Sexual Situations, British Museum, Comedy, F/M, Feminist Themes, Patriarchy, Penises, Period Typical Attitudes, Romance, Romantic Comedy, Victorian Attitudes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-14
Updated: 2021-02-14
Packaged: 2021-03-16 19:48:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,023
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29337825
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PacificRimbaud/pseuds/PacificRimbaud
Summary: In London, 1851, Draco Malfoy, Earl of Wiltshire, has been tasked with gifting the British Museum with a bequest from his grandfather's estate. Simple enough, but for the mysterious contents of the gift, and the museum staff assigned to receive it.
Relationships: Hermione Granger/Draco Malfoy
Comments: 121
Kudos: 346
Collections: Dramione Valentine Exchange





	A Woman of Independent Means

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Misdemeanor1331](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Misdemeanor1331/gifts).
  * In response to a prompt by Anonymous in the [DramioneValentineExchange](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/DramioneValentineExchange) collection. 



> My prompt for the exchange was: Historical AU Dramione - an independent woman, a secretly dependent man  
> While this is probably not what you had in mind, [Misdemeanor1331](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Misdemeanor1331/pseuds/Misdemeanor1331/works), I hope you enjoy it! Happy Valentine's Day!

**London, 1851**

The valet coughed into his handkerchief.

“Good God, the air’s thick this afternoon.”

“Indeed.”

“Shall I run it in for you, Your Lordship?”

Draco Malfoy, Earl of Wiltshire, heir to the marquessate of Winchester, frowned at the polished wooden box beside him in the carriage.

“Thank you, Roberts. Unfortunately my presence is required at the…”

He frowned.

“Unboxing, my Lord?”

“Yes. Since my father has communicated his disinterest in no uncertain terms, the responsibility appears to be mine.”

Dirt perpetually drifted into the road from construction underway to either side. After a week of heavy weather, Great Russell Street had become a field of mud. Horses slogged through it ankle-deep in the adjacent lane, snorting whorls of vapor into the unseasonable April cold and shaking the rain off their heads.

The Earl's driver urged his team forward. The carriage wheels spun ineffectually, rocked backward, then lurched on.

A corporeal grey-green fog permeated the city, tinged with coal dust and a piquant bloom of Thames effluvium. It dimmed the figures moving along the crowded pavements, pushed the red-brick facades out of focus, and softly decapitated every roofline. One might have believed oneself adrift in a maudlin fairy sleep were it not for an assertive horse shit smell and the defiant Cockney newsboy on the corner, braying for the Times.

“Here we are, Sir.”

Roberts hopped through the door as the carriage stopped, overstepping a steaming equine deposit, and began testing the ground with the tip of his shoe.

“Nice and solid just here, Sir.”

Draco tucked the box under his arm, pressed his handkerchief over his nose and mouth, and alighted from the carriage. His shoe met the pavement with a vulgar squelch.

A workman admitted him through an iron gate, then he marched through the empty forecourt's mist and mud toward the slender white Ionic columns of the British Museum.

A network of scaffolding caged the south portico. The uppermost platform reached the face of the pediment, where repetitive metallic tinks and muttered oaths issued from beneath a shroud of construction canvas. A pair of laborers in dungarees sat on the platform’s edge, pipes clenched between their teeth.

“Oi! Watch out there, Your Lordship!”

Draco stuttered two steps backward as a smoldering plug of tobacco plummeted past and burst in a shower of sparks at his feet.

“My sincerest apologies, guv'nor,” called one man. “If I’d have known you were there I’d have held off emptying my pipe.”

Draco scowled and dusted his waistcoat with a pristine grey calfskin glove.

“We’re working on _The Progress of Civilization_ up here,” shouted the second man. “Please inform Lord Russell that from this exalted vantage point, civilization has progressed to where, on a clear day, we can see the sewage gases coming in off the river.”

Draco touched the brim of his hat and went on, pausing only to scuff the grime from his shoes against the edge of a concrete step.

London was being reborn, and the museum along with it.

Distant hammer strikes echoed in the foyer, where pine dust and solvent smells overrode the rank fog outside. Workmen swarmed the inner courtyard, hauling paint tins, shifting saw horses and stacking bundled planks. As Draco stood, dumbly holding his box and uncertain where to go, there was a heavy wooden clatter and a volley of shouts.

“Watch it, Gerry, you nearly had my fuckin’ foot!”

Draco pursed his lips, considering the necessity of an evening bath.

“Lord Malfoy! Good afternoon.”

An underwhelming man in a dull grey suit trotted down the steps at the foyer’s western end, cradling a green vessel with gilt handles in one arm.

“Mr. Cartwright, I presume,” said Draco.

“Yes! Hello! Rather gloomy outside today,” said Cartwright. He snuffled through his congested nose, shifted his vase to the other arm and pointed at Draco’s casket. “Is that the bequest?”

“Yes.”

Draco jutted the box toward him. For a brief, merciful moment, it seemed the afternoon’s affair had concluded, and he could drop by Brooks’s for lunch and a glass of port.

“Excellent!” Cartwright brought out a handkerchief and blew his nose with a honking fanfaronade. “I was told by your solicitor that the estate requires an itemized receipt.”

“Yes,” said Draco. “That’s correct.”

Blast it.

“Alright! Let’s go and get your treasures catalogued, and you can be on your way.”

The hammering retreated as Cartwright guided them through a door, down a flight of stairs, and along what felt like endless furlongs of labyrinthine halls. All was modern and new, with concrete floors and green-painted walls still reeking of linseed oil and turpentine. They passed more than a dozen doors with glinting brass knobs, and finally stopped before an office at the end of a pinched and dimly lit passage.

“Here we are.”

Cartwright knocked. The smile he fixed beneath his mustache sent its oiled bars angling toward his ears.

Nothing happened, so he knocked again.

After a full, silent minute, it appeared no response was forthcoming.

He cast his mustachios downward.

“I wonder if—oh!”

The door swung open with sufficient force to generate a draft. Both Draco and Cartwright jolted, though only Cartwright embellished his surprise with a little “Ah!”

A young woman stood in the doorway, lifting her brow in wordless inquiry.

Draco’s immediate thought was that she was one of the museum’s cleaning staff.

But her expression was so bluntly impatient and utterly devoid of any hint that she discerned, let alone deferred to, his rank, he was forced to reconsider.

She dressed like the head housekeeper at Malfoy Manor, in a plain navy blue linen gown and a sturdy white apron. An unfussy silver chatelaine dangled from the apron’s waist. Its clasp was formed in the likeness of a ferocious lion’s head, and the chains dangling below supported a watch, sharp-tipped scissors, a clutch of small keys, a silvernet pouch, and sundry practical tools.

Seamstress? Possibly. Deep in the bowels of the British Museum?

Hm.

While Draco observed her, a curl leaped free of her coiffure and swung down over one eye. She shook her head twice, but unable to shift it thus, screwed up her pert pink mouth and directed a gust of breath at it. Finally, she swept it towards her temple with the back of her wrist.

It promptly resumed its cheeky position.

Not a gentleman’s daughter, then.

She was neither tall nor petite, dark nor pale. There was nothing remarkable about the slope of her nose, the plushness of her lips, the thickness of her lashes, the brilliancy of her complexion, or any other marker of female beauty Draco had been used to observe.

What she had in abundance was a formidable, naked intelligence asserting itself behind a pair of dark eyes, and an alarming insurgency of curling brown hair.

It circled her head like a catastrophic halo, backlit by lamplight from the room beyond, corkscrewing itself free from the edges of an attempted chignon.

A charming spray of freckles dusted her nose.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Cartwright,” she said.

Her voice was businesslike, Draco noted: brusque and decisive.

“My apologies,” she went on. “I was occupied with the goats.”

Catching sight of the vessel in Cartwright’s arm, she gasped.

“Oh! Is that the French vase?”

She held out a hand, and Cartwright passed the vase to her by one of its gilded handles.

“And you must be Mr. Malfoy,” she said, turning to Draco. “I’m Hermione Granger.”

She stuck out her free hand.

Draco regarded it.

Having been addressed inappropriately, he meant to say nothing at all, but surprised himself by offering, “We have a vase almost identical to that one at the Manor. At the back of a closet.”

All three of them studied the vase.

The scene painted on its visible side featured a young couple engaged in a rather fanciful expression of _eros._

“Just like this one?” asked Cartwright doubtfully. “Erm.” He coughed into the side of his fist, sending his mustachios trembling. "Miss Granger,” he continued brightly, “Lord Malfoy has brought his grandfather’s collection.”

“The first of his collection,” added Draco. “I’ve been led to understand there’s more.”

Miss Granger’s handshake hung unconsummated in the air so long that a stormfront of annoyance gathered around the edges of her expression. Draco could practically see minuscule lightning forks sparking across her temples.

She let her hand fall, then dusted it on her apron.

“Alright,” she said. “Come in and we’ll get started.”

Pivoting on a heel, she sent her chatelaine clanging and waved for them to follow her into the room.

“Well!” said Cartwright. “Don’t hesitate to send for me if you have need. But—” he daubed his handkerchief under his nostrils "—you’re in very capable hands, Your Lordship!”

“Pardon?” Draco swallowed an unaccountable swell of panic at the thought of being left alone with this wild-haired Astrape, goddess of lightning, in a housekeeper’s dress. “Are you leaving?”

But Cartwright had already shifted down the hall at haste and rounded the corner.

Draco turned to watch Miss Granger through the open door.

Every confident, industrious motion suggested that the room belonged to her.

What a saucy, impertinent creature.

She bustled around tall cabinets with glass doors and endless banks of drawers lining the walls, each brass pull and frame labeled in a neat hand. After shelving the vase alongside half a dozen other porcelain items, she fetched thin white cotton gloves from a drawer, drew them on, and set to work clearing metal figures from a table in the center of the room.

He watched her whisk away a small brass billy goat. Its enormous horns nearly brushed its back, and it had a pair of massive—

Draco abruptly looked away.

Troublesome as this woman seemed to be, allowing her to handle artifacts in the absence of a trained professional evidenced tremendous trust on the museum’s part. It showed her in a very flattering light indeed. Some adjustment would be necessary—less seething if she could manage it, for starters—but he considered whether the generous wages offered at the Manor might persuade her to join his staff.

She filed each brass figure inside a wide, shallow drawer. Once the table was cleared, she vigorously brushed a hand broom across its surface, then wiped it down with a damp cloth reeking of vinegar.

Unambiguous housekeeper behavior.

Draco’s shoulders relaxed.

Whatever novice curator they’d assigned to his grandfather’s bequest would be along at any moment.

“Please excuse the mess,” she said, “it’s been a busy morning.”

“Not a problem. Should I expect the curator along shortly? I mean to lunch at the club.”

She stopped moving and looked at him.

“I’ll be receiving your items, Mr. Malfoy.”

He craned his neck forward, as if he hadn’t heard her properly.

“What?”

“I’m the curator who will record your items. If you’ll give me a moment, I’m nearly ready to begin. I have every confidence you’ll be off to your club within an hour, receipt in hand.”

“You’re employed here?” Draco entirely failed to mask his disbelief. “Working directly with the artifacts?”

Miss Granger yanked a drawer open.

“Yes,” she said. “I’m afraid that I am.”

“I’m terribly sorry, Miss Granger. Am I to understand that you are the person who’s been entrusted to receive my grandfather’s bequest?”

“I have, Mr. Malfoy.”

“Lord Malfoy.”

“What?”

From the very moment of his first steps, his nursemaids had ensured that he bore himself in the upright fashion of a gentleman. But he drew his already stiff posture to its utmost erect potential, and lifted his chin.

“The appropriate form of address when speaking to an Earl is _Lord.”_ He employed a magnanimous, conversational tone. There was no need to speak to her harshly. He merely needed to correct an ignorant omission. “At our level of acquaintance, you may address me as _Lord Malfoy,_ or _my Lord,_ or _Your Lordship.”_

She blinked three times. He counted.

“You have my apologies, Your Lordship,” she said.

Draco discovered, for the first time in his life, what it was to be insulted by the delivery of one’s own honorific.

With an audible intake of breath, she set out a notebook and pen, laid a rectangle of plush black velvet over the tabletop, and began arranging brass tools in a neat row along its edge.

At last, she stilled, and folded her hands before herself.

“Would you like to place your box on the table, Lord Malfoy?”

“There must be some mistake.” Draco moved no further into the room. A sheen of sweat had asserted itself at the base of his spine. “My grandfather indicated in his will that the contents of this box were of a...delicate nature.”

“I perfectly comprehend, Mr— _Lord_ Malfoy.”

Again, Draco winced at the profoundly disrespectful way she chose to show her respect.

“I believe you’ll find both my moral character and intellectual mettle sufficient to withstand the contents of that or any other box you’re capable of producing,” she said.

She flicked open the watch dangling from her waist, stared at its face for longer than seemed necessary, then snapped it shut.

With perfect, silent clarity, she communicated he was taking up her valuable time.

What an un-bloody-believable little housekeeper she was.

Draco walked stiffly into the room and deposited the box on the table beside her cloth. Then he stepped back, turning his hat around in his hands.

He genuinely didn’t know the casket’s contents.

But judging by several items his grandfather believed appropriate for display throughout the Manor, anything he felt ought to remain stashed in a wooden box were certainly going to be indecorus for viewing between two un—

Was she unmarried?

He attempted to discern the outline of a ring beneath her gloves.

 _“Miss_ Granger, did you say?”

“That’s correct.”

Unmarried, then.

Good, he thought.

No, not good.

A small brass clasp held the box closed. She flipped it open, then lifted the lid, and the room flooded with the distinctive sweet smell of beeswax.

From his vantage point, Draco could see a nest of paper packed to the box’s brim.

She—unmarried seamstress-curator in dreary museum basement, not unbright eyes, prehensile hair, drawers full of heavily endowed goats and disconcerting sharp scissors close at hand—began to uncover whatever was inside.

He held his breath.

A Malfoy held propriety above almost all other values.

Decency and decorum, he was told from his earliest years, guarded men of consequence from society’s barbed tongues; from moral debasement; and, of paramount importance, from the loss of titles and property to unworthy heirs.

Being forced to sacrifice his and this maiden-spinster housekeeper’s honor to his still deeper sense of duty was abhorrent.

Yet he was irrevocably bound by the filial duty owed his grandfather, and by a more venal duty to his pocketbook. Abraxas had wished his bequest handed off to the museum without risk of theft or injury. So fervent was this desire, his will stipulated an extraordinary set of conditions. One of Abaraxas’s heirs (either Lucius or Draco would do) was required as witness to the transfer of half a dozen caches of undisclosed artifacts. Upon receiving itemized invoices for each, signed by the attending heir and relevant museum staff, the estate would release five thousand pounds to each of them.

Pocket money, so far as the Malfoy estate was concerned, but it would keep Draco comfortably in Havana cigars, barrel-aged Scotch and the occasional game of cards.

“What is it that you do for the museum, Miss Granger?”

Alone with her and Abraxas’s box, a woman’s rank had never felt more important.

“My primary area of expertise is Roman artifacts.” She removed bundle after bundle of paper, taking great care to ensure each was empty before setting them to the side. “But they have me down here receiving, cataloguing and storing all manner of pieces. Sumerian, Norse, Nipponese, French”—she jerked her head toward the green vase—”if it ruffles feathers in another department, it makes its way down to my office to be forgotten.”

After removing a third of the box’s contents, she at last withdrew a weightier bundle, wrapped with obvious care.

“Hello, there,” she said to it.

It was long and narrow, more than half the length of Miss Granger’s forearm, and wider at one end.

She lay the package on her velvet mat and untucked the paper’s edge. With a featherlight touch, she unrolled the packing material, one attentive unfurling after another.

At the moment the object revealed itself, she gasped.

“What is it?” he asked.

Slowly, reverently, she held it up.

There were moments, Draco would later think (glass of ‘27 port in hand after he’d booted Theo from his favorite chair at the club and spent half an hour sucking soothingly on the end of a cigar) when one arrived at a genuine crisis of the spirit.

This was one such moment.

He wasn't a virgin. That was an unalterable fact. But unless one had proclivities that he did not, the act of love was done privately—and in his case only when strictly necessary and with no small degree of guilt—with fickle actresses, randy widows, and in the washroom with eager, attractive middle-aged servants at other men’s country estates.

His own quiet exploits sent him slinking to church in search of absolution half the time. Debauching an eligible innocent in a washroom, drawing room, bedroom, or any room whatsoever simply wasn’t done. Even the hint of impropriety with the wrong sort of woman was enough to break him out in a full-body sweat.

But in order to ensure one wasn’t engaged in improper behavior with the wrong sort of woman, one needed to determine what sort of woman one was engaging with.

It suddenly, acutely mattered that he know, because—

Miss Granger was holding a penis.

She had lifted the phallus from its paper wrapper with great care, and laid it down. Then she withdrew a second parcel from the box, and unwrapped it, too. It contained yet another, smaller phallus, which she placed beside the first, before giving each shaft a gentle, professional pat of appreciation.

They were formed from pale yellow beeswax, hollow and delicate but rendered with such vivid detail that Draco found himself visually tracing a thick vein from one member’s heavy wax scrotum to its fully revealed tip.

She’d been speaking, apparently to him.

“—never seen such beautifully preserved examples.”

“What?” Draco croaked.

His throat was desiccated.

She ignored him, and kept on unwrapping his grandfather’s penises.

They lay in a row on her cloth, like idle figures basking on the strand. On one end a compact little fellow napped inside its foreskin. On the other lay the final member of five in total. It was a titan, with a glossy butter-white surface, aggressive bell-shaped head jutting from its sheath, and formidable gonads that could have easily sired half the population of Pompeii.

“What in God’s name are those?” he asked.

“Have you been listening to me at all?”

“No.”

He’d been preoccupied with the nightmare image of being involved in a driving accident while sitting beside the penis crate. His horses would be loose, his carriage dashed to pieces, and his corpse, lying with its eyes open to God in the mud of the road, surrounded by a scattered host of waxen members of all shapes and sizes. Everyone would see and then remark upon the event. It was all that would be talked about, in every ballroom and drawing room and billiards room in London, and nothing else that had ever happened in his life would have mattered. He’d be the fellow who’d been driving about London with his box of cocks.

“Votives, Mr. Malfoy,” she said, “to the fertility god, Priapus. Your grandfather left a note.”

She held up a letter, written in his grandfather’s hand.

“Priapus,” Draco echoed. “Yes.”

She began measuring the members, and taking down notes in her book.

“Ten point seven four centimetres.”

She muttered to herself while she worked. She also flicked out the tip of her pink tongue to moisten the corner of her actually rather plump lower lip.

The tiny chap’s length successfully discerned, she started in with a set of calipers.

“Girth…” She scratched away with her pen.

Unbidden, he recalled a small-breasted French coquette he’d encountered on his Grand Tour. An artist’s model, she’d fed him pralines and hot wine and drunkenly told him he reminded her of Orpheus, but could provide no evidence to support the comparison. She’d been with painters and princes, merchants and masters. He’d been rather put out when she elected to go to bed with Theo instead.

Anne-Suzette, by all accounts, had been capable of astonishing feats. But no act of hers could have shocked him more than the vision of Miss Granger holding a fabric measure against an enormous antiquarian penis that smelled faintly of lavender honey.

“Twenty three point six two centimetres.”

Draco was not in possession of a twenty three point six two centimetre member. By the looks of it, he was absolutely sure he didn’t want to be. But this perplexing Miss Granger had one. She was holding it to the light, marveling at its imposing stature, pinching its sinister shaft with her brass calipers and declaring—

“Six point two five centimetres.”

It was a fucking enormous cock.

“How is it that you’ve come to be the resident expert on phalluses?”

He nearly looked around the room to see who’d said it, despite having felt and heard the words emerge from his own mouth.

She glanced at him with her bright dark eyes and narrowed them down in displeasure.

“I’m not. I’m one of several experts on Roman antiquity, one of two staff members with an interest in properly cataloguing the museum’s collection, and the only person who hasn’t complained about being asked to store objects of a controversial nature in their office.”

Holding the daunting rod in one fist, fingertips failing to meet around its circumference, she began measuring the balls.

Draco shifted uncomfortably.

Oh, dear God.

While she marked testicular dimensions in her book, her lips parted in concentration, he covered his trouser front with his hat and made a minor adjustment.

“How is it that you came to be an expert on Roman antiquity, then?” he asked.

Tags were the next order of business. She leaned over a stack of small cards, writing out labels in her beautiful hand.

_Priapic Votive #1. Priapic Votive #2._

Another hank of obstreperous hair jettisoned itself from her chignon, this time at her nape. The curl slid down her shoulder and settled midair with a jaunty recoil.

“The same way most people do,” she said. “Travels through Italy. Reading and study.”

She remained curt and expeditious. He somewhat regretted not having shaken her hand.

Her chatelaine jangled like pragmatic bells as she turned around and fetched some string. The fearsome scissors made their appearance to snip it into lengths. Next, she tied the tags to each member where shaft met balls, finishing each with a tidy bow.

“Am I to understand you receive a wage for this employment, Miss Granger?”

Pen in hand, leaning over her notebook once more, she scoffed.

“I do indeed, Your Lordship.”

“Don’t your parents object?”

“My parents?” She looked up and pinned him with a stare.

Her hair, he realized, was infused with the invisible electricity of her innate vexation.

God, he wished to vex her.

He wished to watch her spark and sizzle and arc into luminous life.

“Yes. I shouldn’t think any mother and father would choose that their educated daughter handle objects of an obscene nature.”

“Only their uneducated daughters?”

Draco bristled.

“I didn’t mean—”

“No, of course you didn’t. In any case, my parents are in Australia. And before you ask, no. They’re not criminals.”

“Then surely your guardian must protest.”

He felt enormously put out that whoever was responsible for this woman was being so remiss in shielding her from an unseemly occupation. Were she his to manage—not as a wife, which was impossible, _laughable,_ rather, but as his ward, for instance—she’d be kept employed by wholesome, savoury pursuits. Scissors or no, she probably wouldn’t enjoy needlework. Her hands seemed a bit small for piano. Equestrianism, perhaps. Undoubtedly, he would chaperone her to lectures and concerts. Time spent reading together would be a blessing. She could sit at his knee while he read aloud. Assisting his own scientific inquiries would be considered a safe avenue for intellectual stimulation if she required it.

Yes. Yes, of course.

He could see her clearly, bent over the work table in the library, looking back over her shoulder and pleading with sweet, feminine complaisance for him to steady her hand while she decanted liquid from a flask.

Clearly there would be no more discussion of phallicism and the worship of the generative principle in antiquity, but were she under his aegis, he would guide her toward a suitable marriage partner. And surely no man of worth would bar her from attaining fluency in the carnal arts once safely ensconced in the marriage bed.

“I have no guardian.” She’d come jingling around the table, and now thrust a paper at him. “Here you are.”

“What do you mean, you have no guardian?”

“I’m afraid that I am in full possession of myself, my Lord.”

Paid employment was apparently unavoidable in whatever reduced circumstances she’d found herself in, but that she was alone in the world, left to fist the thousand cocks of Priapus for wages in front of any man who walked into the room was an outrage.

Draco suddenly wished to throttle his own, dead, licentious grandfather.

Then and there, he made a determination. He would sacrifice as many Brooks lunches as need be. Under no circumstances would Lucius be the one to witness this poor girl’s debasement before the perversions of the Malfoy estate.

She rattled the paper at him.

It was his receipt.

“You’ll want to find Cartwright and have him sign as well, in case whoever’s asking for this chooses to not recognize my signature.” She jutted her pen toward him. “Here, if you’d like to sign it yourself before you go.”

His hand was numb as he took the paper from her, his feet shuffling without his orders to the table. Unthinking, he swept his signature across the bottom of the page, then folded the paper and slid it into his jacket pocket.

He stepped back and stared at her.

“There are five,” he said.

“Five what?”

“Five caskets. I have no idea what’s in them.”

“Alright,” she said. “If they’re of a similar character, I’m sure their perusal will be my responsibility.”

“Ah.”

“Good day then, Your Lordship." She hadn’t once stopped fizzing and crackling with that specific galvanizing energy. “Enjoy your lunch.”

“I shall.”

He breathed in, glanced at the cache still laid out on the table, and realized with dismay that he’d probably spend the rest of his life getting turned on by the smell of beeswax.

“Do you need me to show you out?” she asked.

He didn’t, but answered in the affirmative all the same.

They retraced the maze of corridors. He trailed behind her swishing pragmatic skirts, her tinkling scissors and watch, and her utterly preposterous hair, until they overtook Cartwright heading up the stairs.

“Did it go well?” he asked, looping his signature across the receipt.

Draco, newly initiated into the cult of wicked objects, noted that Cartwright didn’t ask what had been inside the box.

“I believe so. Thanks to Miss Granger’s capable—”

He’d meant to shake her hand before he left, but he turned to find her swooshing off through the basement door without so much as a farewell.

“Will she be seeing to all of my grandfather’s articles?” Draco asked Cartwright as they walked to the front doors.

“Miss Granger?” His mustaches drooped. “Yes, I suppose she will. Is that going to be a problem?”

Draco opened the door to the looming exterior fug.

“No,” he said. “No, that will be perfectly acceptable.”

He tripped his way across the muddy forecourt to find Roberts asleep in the carriage.

“Oh! Sorry, my Lord,” he muttered. “Bloody fumes, don’t half make you tired. Dispatched your box, then?”

“Yes, thank God.”

No risk of dying in the street amongst the priapic ruins.

Draco gripped the edge of the seat as the carriage jolted to a start.

“Roberts,” he said, “did you know that they employed women to actually handle objects in the museum?”

Roberts yawned as they slipped and skidded through the left turn onto Bloomsbury Street.

“I believe you’ll find women are employed in all manner of professions, Your Lordship.”

“Yes, but”—Draco leaned forward and spread out his hands in emphasis—”with the goats, you know. And the vases.”

“I’m not sure I do know about goats and vases, my Lord.”

Draco leaned back and drummed his fingers against his knees.

“It’s shocking.”

“Sounds it.”

The city slipped by past the window, damp and fusty.

Draco let his eyes fall closed, and a vision painted itself across the backs of his eyes.

He saw a barefooted girl in profile on the Tuscan shore, the marble-bright Mediterranean meeting a cloudless sky behind her. Only she wasn’t one of the faceless multitudes of _bella signorinas_ streaming by as elements of the scenery on his Tour, but the impudent, self-possessed Miss Granger. Her eyes sparked and her hair tumbled piece by piece from her chignon until the whole dark mass of it was draped over a gleaming shoulder.

He heard an echo of her voice.

_Travels through Italy. Reading and study._

In this waking dream, she wasn’t the matter-of-fact, intensely focused woman he’d seen in the museum. She was sun-soaked and easy, cheeks wine-flushed and shoulders slack. He put a book in her hand, and his chest flooded with a drowsy, dilatory warmth. 

There was a far-off tinkling, like bells or a chatelaine’s charms, then she turned to him and smiled.

“Roberts?” Draco said, eyes still shut.

“Yes, my Lord?”

“I need a bath.”

**Author's Note:**

> I did not make up the priapic votives—they are actual items in the British Museum's collection, gifted by Society of Dilettanti member Sir William Hamilton in 1784. The article _['Keep Hands Off Them': The Case of the Priapic Votives and the British Museum](https://www.bu.edu/sequitur/2017/05/01/keep-hands-off-them-the-case-of-the-priapic-votives-at-the-british-museum/)_ is a fascinating look at their origin and what happened to them over their decades in the museum.  
> Gratitude to my beta [granger_danger](https://archiveofourown.org/users/granger_danger/pseuds/granger_danger/works) for helping me make this as tidy as FussyVictorian!Draco's suit.


End file.
